In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.